First thing i thought of, but yeah, most devs today have never held a disk like that.

Why do i always gets so extreamly nostalgic every time something from the 80s and 90s are posted... I guess everyone is like that, stuff from their childhood remains loved.

I think also because it was a fresh field, nobody knew IT so it was exciting. It was like a small interest, similar to collecting stamps or something.

For the younger generation it might be a philosophical experience, because that is, The Icon of Saving!

I was informed everything was stored on the cloud. Why would we need these things called "floppy disks" (which don't like floppy at all)?

/s just in case

I've never tried it. Is it actually easy to do that with a fridge magnet? Like people say a magnet will destroy a modern HDD but in reality it would take a massively dangerous magnet to do that. Like not anything you could buy as a consumer.

Out of all possibility of people not understandibg this because magnet corrupt the disk, i actually didnt realise it was a magnet and thought it was sticked to a wall with some black sponge on top and was totallt condused what's the joke

Younger people are not stupid, a technician that's able to write software knows what a floppy disk is. I also know how a phonograph cylinder works and they went out of time a little longer ago.

Finding the magnet is easy, but finding the save icon could be tricky.

Don't dead, open inside

It's that you, Yoda?

That's probably integrated speakers. Those can have quite powerful magnets. If it has old spinny hard drives, those have magnets, too. Sometimes the lid also has a magnet if there is a hall effect sensor for detecting if it's closed.

Usually it's hard to find a magnet that'd be strong enough to make electronics inside a laptop malfunction without breaking the case open. Your regular fridge magnets are too weak for that kind of application, so are the ones usually found in glasses cases. And if you happen to be an owner of a chonky magnet, you probably already know the thing is dangerous.

…But I sure DO miss storage media that makes a satisfying “Kachunk” when loaded, and could be forcefully ejected like a spent artillery casing.

Older computers just have a nice mechanical ambiance that newer machines don't replicate quite as well.

I don't miss having the time to go make a cup of tea whilst waiting for the computer to turn on, or having the monitor scream the entire time it's on, but I do miss hearing the hard drive spin-up, and all the POST beeps and drive stepper noises when the computer's booting up.

Floppy disks were a human size. When we need removable media now, it's either a microSD card, which are so tiny there's no way to label them, and thumb drives, which...USB-A is irritating.

I miss those "giant" zip disks that lasted like 5 years as a storage media. They were between 3.5 floppies and burnable CD Roms.

I recently got into LPs. It's slowly replacing the default home music source. It's really satisfying to have solid physical media.

Older PCs couldn't always boot from CD. In those cases, you needed a boot disk. It had just enough OS to get the cd drive working and allow for a full install. They also allowed for basic repair or maintenance tasks e.g. resizing the windows partition.

Veterans kept a couple about at home. Nothing like the catch 22. "I need a boot disk to fix my PC/I need my PC to make a boot disk."

When the OS is DOS you can easily fit the entire thing on a floppy.

Mac OS system 6 too, I think.

A lot of terraform and docker compose files could fit on a floppy still.

Actually, that might be a fun thing to play with. It might not have data. But you could back up a good amount of config and deployment information and have a system to restore data to.

Oh, there's a- Monkey in my pocket! And he's stealing all my change! His stare is blank and glassy I suspect he's deraaaaaanged!

You used to be able to get a whole-ass router that fit on 1.2MB in the late 90's.

Novell SPX routers also ran from a single floppy

Before bios supported bootable cd's you needed them to get the windows 95 install started.

That said, this was an obvious joke image :)

Behind you.